Viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in clinical samples

By Yang Pan, Daitao Zhang, Peng Yang, L. Poon, Quanyi Wang. Lancet. Infectious Diseases (Print), 2020

1,460 citations recorded by the source corpus.

www.thelancet.com/infection Vol 20 April 2020 411 We also studied respiratory samples (nasal [n=1] and throat swabs [n=67], and sputum [n=42]) collected from 80 individuals at different stages of infection. The viral loads ranged from 641 copies per mL to 1·34 × 1011 copies per mL, with a median of 7·99 × 104 in throat samples and 7·52 × 105 in sputum samples (figure C). The only nasal swab tested in this study (taken on day 3 post-onset) showed a viral load of 1·69 × 105 copies per mL. Overall, the viral load early after onset was high (>1 × 106 copies per mL). However, a sputum sample collected N-gene-specific quantitative RT-PCR assay, as described elsewhere. The viral loads in throat swab and sputum samples peaked at around 5–6 days after symptom onset, ranging from around 104 to 107 copies per mL during this time (figure A, B). This pattern of changes in viral load is distinct from the one observed in patients with SARS, which normally peaked at around 10 days after onset. Sputum samples generally showed higher viral loads than throat swab samples. No viral RNA was detected in urine or stool samples from these two patients. We declare no competing interests. XP and DC contributed equally to this work. Patient consent was obtained.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/278f7e0446984aca574c047a464e7a2ae58cef1f

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In Infectious Diseases

1. Kwok-Yung Yuen
2. J. Chan
3. K. To
4. Kwok-Hung Chan
5. Ralph S. Baric
6. Shuofeng Yuan
7. Andrew G. Harrison
8. Tao Lin

Citations in the corpus

• Quantitative Detection and Viral Load Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 in Infected Patients (2020, result): “Consistent with recently reported studies [18, 19], we found that the viral load increased in the early and progressive stages and decreased in the recovery stage.”
• SARS-CoV-2 Reverse Genetics Reveals a Variable Infection Gradient in the Respiratory Tract (2020, positive): “Differences in transmissibility and viral shedding suggest the in vivo replication sites and/or replication efficiency of SARSCoV-2 differ significantly from SARS-CoV (Pan et al., 2020b; Wölfel et al., 2020; Zou et al., 2020).”
• A Review of SARS-CoV-2 and the Ongoing Clinical Trials (2020, background): “In the case of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, substantial virus shedding happens only after the onset of symptoms, therefore, the transmission mainly occurs in a nosocomial manner, namely, after the infected patients have sought medical help [35] .”
• Simulation of the clinical and pathological manifestations of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in golden Syrian hamster model: implications for disease pathogenesis and transmissibility (2020, result): “1% of COVID-19 patients despite that up to 53% of their stool samples are RT-PCR positive.(7,22,23) Myocardial degenerative changes were noted both in our infected hamster and patient autopsy despite the absence of viral antigen detection in the tissues, which is also consistent with the occasional ”
• Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in U.S. Children and Adolescents (2020, neutral): “Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation 6 (8) 1 (2) 1 (2) 8 (4)”
• Estimating clinical severity of COVID-19 from the transmission dynamics in Wuhan, China (2020, result): “In contrast, because (1) the majority of COVID-19 infections do not cause severe disease 8 and (2) hospitals in Wuhan have been overwhelmed, presumably having led to prioritized admission of more serious cases, the sCFR will be substantially lower than the HFR. However, despite a lower sCFR, COVID-1”
• Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and pregnancy (2020, background): “However, this usually requires laboratories to develop in-house test kits and to validate them with internal controls.(20)”
• Dual-Functional Plasmonic Photothermal Biosensors for Highly Accurate Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Detection (2020, background): “39 This indicated that our proposed dual-functional LSPR system has the potential for direct analysis of SARS-CoV-2 sequences in respiratory samples.”
• SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) by the numbers (2020, methodology): “We took the maximal viral load for each patient in nasopharyngeal swabs, throat swabs, stool or in sputum (figure 2 in Wölfel et al., 2020; figure 1 in Kim et al., 2020; Pan et al., 2020).”
• Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission and Pathogenesis (2020, positive): “This finding underscores the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to colonize and replicate in the throat during early infection [37,51,52].”